


Bruiser

by unshrinkingviolets



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Peridot is a geneticist, human(?) AU, jasper is her latest project, partially corrupted Jasper I guess? Definitely Monster Jasper, the famethyst is there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-07-14 15:31:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16043324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unshrinkingviolets/pseuds/unshrinkingviolets
Summary: Peridot was hired to create the perfect lab-grown killing machine, and with Jasper, succeeded beyond anybody's wildest dreams. Jasper is charming, stubborn, eight feet tall with massive claws, and currently waiting on the other side of a door that's not quite strong enough to keep her out. Peridot's world is unraveling pretty quickly, and if it's ever going to be whole again she's going to have to learn to trust her own creation - if she can even begin to trust herself.





	1. The Deal

The knock at the door was just quiet enough to sound friendly.

After the external power had finally been cut and all the alarms stopped howling the silence had been welcome, then threatening, and the knock caught Peridot off guard enough that she almost unlocked the door, as though suddenly life was normal again and doors were things that could be opened safely.

She checked herself and then checked the door camera. In the faint night-vision mode the full extent of the creature on the other side was hard to make out, but Peridot knew every inch of it at once and her hand stopped short of the keypad and trembled, just slightly. The knock came again, followed by a gentle scratching sound. She thought about the marks in the steel door that even that light brush of claws would leave. She turned back to her work.

The last of the backup data was on the five racks of servers in one end of the vault. For now it was still intact and the servers were still ticking away, but if she did her job right there wouldn’t be a single trace of it left before long. That was the arrangement, for if things got out of hand. Clear the logs, wipe the disks. Nobody will come for you. Leave if you can leave. If you can’t, there’s a pistol in the desk.

The intercom clicked and Peridot froze, instantly hyperventilating, the processed silence on the speaker sucking all the heat out of the room.  
“Peri . . .” a smoky growl of a voice cut through the slight static “Peri, let me in. Please.”  
“I should never have let her call me that,” Peridot thought. “She might call me something cute but she still wants me dead.”  
“Peri, please, I just want to talk to you. All the others left and I don’t know what’s going on.”

The intercom clicked again a few moments later and Jasper asked again to be let in, scratching at the door a little harder this time and making an unbearable screech on the steel plate. She wasn’t quite to pleading yet. If she started to beg Peridot would have to hurry in case Jasper abandoned the diplomatic route and went for brute force. The vault door would take her some time to get through but it wasn’t necessarily impossible.

“Cmon, Peri. I know you’re in there, why won’t you talk to me?”  
Almost . . . almost sad. Peridot tried a deep breath and went to the intercom. She double-tapped the TALK button to leave it on and said “Go away, Jasper. Go find somebody else, I’m busy.” If she was going to have to argue this out she was going to finish running her program at the same time.  
“I knew you were in there,” said Jasper, all vulnerability gone from her voice. “Whatcha working on?”  
“Nothing.”  
“Awfully heavy door just to do nothing behind.”  
“It sure is.”  
A sigh came through the intercom. Jasper was getting comfortable.  
“So listen, Peri, about this whole . . . situation we find ourselves in. I just wanted to say I’m sorry if I caused you any problems in your research but I can’t really understand why everybody’s being so . . . uppity.”  
Peridot snorted a laugh.  
“Uppity? Jasper, this whole facility’s on lockdown, they cut the power twenty minutes ago, and I’m doing what is literally the last thing I will ever do in this lab, and possibly in my life.”  
“Ah! So you’re NOT doing nothing in there.”  
Peridot rubbed her eyes underneath her glasses.  
“No, Jasper, I am not doing nothing.”  
“Well then what ARE you doing?”  
She could lie, although what difference would it make? She took her time finishing a line of code and said “I’m erasing your life.”  
Short pause.  
“Erasing it?”  
“From the computers, yes.”  
“But - Peri, that’s just data.”  
“Yeah.”  
“So it’s not really my life, then, is it?”  
“No, not really, but - “  
“Peridot, are you in trouble?”  
Jasper sounded genuinely concerned.  
“Peridot!”  
“We’re all in trouble, Jasper.”  
“What do you mean? Is there somebody coming for you? Are they going to take you away like the took away Skinny and everybody else? I can hold ‘em off if you need more time in there, nobody’s getting past me if you don’t want them to.”  
“Nobody’s coming, Jasper.”  
“No?”  
“No. That . . . that wasn’t part of the deal.”

Jasper considered this outside while Peridot finished the last line of her code and checked it over.  
“What’s the deal?” she finally asked, sounding businesslike. Peridot tried to gather her thoughts.  
“The deal . . . is that if things get out of hand, like seriously out of hand, like they did today . . . I get to this vault, and I clear the data, and I’m done. No backups, no rescue plans, I’m just done. If I can leave, I’m free to go, but after that I don’t exist.”  
“Don’t exist?”  
“Yeah, see, nobody knows who I am, outside this facility, I had to do some disappearing to get to work here.”  
The code was running. There was a countdown of 15 minutes for it to finish before she did a manual erasure sequence on the server racks.  
“I uh, I’m not alive. As far as anybody knows. Which wasn’t hard, I mean, I don’t have any family and most of my other relationships weren’t very close, so . . .”  
“So you leave here and you’re nobody.” Something about this was bothering Jasper.  
“That’s the plan. I’m nobody, I know nothing, there’s no paper trail, and you’re either destroyed or sold off to somewhere you won’t draw attention to yourself.”  
“Well that won’t be easy, because I'm pretty hard not to pay attention to."  
Peridot laughed a little at the swagger in Jasper’s voice.  
“So that means you’re coming out of that room when you’re done, right?”

Peridot went cold again. Of course. This was the deal. But the reality of it never quite settled on her before, that once that timer ran down and the capacitor built into each server rack discharged and fried the hard drives, she was going to have to either sit and wait for death to come, or open the vault door and somehow get outside, get to her car (did she still have a car? Were cars even real?), and drive away.

And then what?

“Peri? You’re coming out soon, right? We can talk?”  
“We are talking.”  
“Yes, but I can’t see you. I like to be able to see you.”  
“You won’t be able to see me anymore, after I leave. You realize that, right?”  
“Yeah.”  
There was a catch in Jasper’s voice. The reality was settling in for her, too.  
“What happens next, Peri?”  
“I don’t know.”  
“But you always know!”  
“Not this time. This is out of my hands.”  
“Why?”

Of all her traits Jasper’s insistence on asking “Why?” unnerved Peridot the most.  
“Wh - Why? WHY? Because you took it out of my hands! You took it out of my hands when you attacked everybody in the facility! You took it out of my hands when you destroyed my lab and tried to kill the entire Board of Directors! So don’t ask me why, ask your fucking self!”  
“They were hurting my siblings!”  
“So what!”  
“So nobody’s allowed to do that!”  
“And you thought the correct response was to start killing people?”  
“That’s what I’m FOR!”

Jasper hit the door to punctuate that remark and dented it inwards. Ten minutes. Peridot watched numbers blink. She didn’t want to talk anymore but she left the intercom on. It felt slightly less like she was alone.

Jasper sighed heavily out in the corridor, and didn’t say anything. When the counter hit 7:59 Peridot turned towards the door again.  
“Jasper?”  
There was a grunt in response.  
“If I open this door what will you do?”  
“I’ll come in.”  
“And then what?”  
“I’ll help you.”  
“With what?”  
“With anything. I promise.”

Peridot moved before her brain could stop her, punched in the access code, and stood back. The vault lock slowly clunked and the door swung slightly open. A tremendously powerful hand tipped with heavy claws pushed it open the rest of the way, and Jasper ducked through the doorframe and into the room.

There was still blood on her face and hair, and mud on the rest of her. She smelled of sweat and smoke. One of the curling horns that sprouted from her forehead had some new scratches and chips in its tip, and her legs were scarred from the ropes and nets and had been vainly deployed to catch her. She squatted down to be closer to Peridot’s eye level. Peridot couldn’t meet her gaze so Jasper put a finger under her chin and lifted it up. Peridot felt warm and shivery all at once, lost in the volcanic glow of Jasper’s golden eyes.

For a moment, Jasper only held her under a crooked smile. “Do you trust me?” she asked. Peridot tried to put the last two hours out of her mind, swallowed, and said “Yes. I do. Do you trust me?”  
“Of course I do.” Jasper dropped her hand and stood up again. “So what’s the plan?”

***

“That thing looks . . . grotesque,” said Amethyst Security Officer 8XM, not untruthfully.  
“You’re grotesque,” muttered Peridot, hunched over her tablet.  
8XM shrugged. “How many days left?”  
“Ten.”  
“How do you manage to grow them that fast?”  
“It’s . . . unbelievably complicated,” said Peridot.  
“I figured.”

8XM turned back to the window looking into the incubation room. An enormous envelope of heavy plastic was suspended in the center with hoses and wires connected to it at various points. It was filled with a hazy synthetic amniotic fluid, and floating peacefully in the center was the indistinct bulk of Peridot’s new project, still quietly gestating.

“It’s like -” 8XM searched in the air for words “It’s like a big ziploc bag full of chicken noodle soup, but it’s got, like, a whole chicken leg in it or -”  
“Ames, do you have anything you need to be doing somewhere else? Just generally?”  
8XM chuckled.  
“Sorry, doc. Actually I do want to talk about containment policies if you have a second.”  
“Containment?”  
“In case this one’s a runner.”  
“I can assure you it won’t be.”  
“And that’s wonderful to hear, but just in case - you do understand that if it tries to get out of this facility we have to destroy it. If we can.”  
Peridot rubbed her eyes under her glasses.  
“Yes. Yes, I understand, but it really won’t be necessary.”  
“Of course not, but -” 8XM pulled over a chair and sat, trying to get on Peridot’s eye level. “Look,” she said ”this is a lightly-staffed facility, yeah? There’s only ten of me, there’s only one of you, and your first two designs are great, but they’re not fighters, you know?”  
“Right, but -”  
“If this facility has to go on lockdown, we need to know what we’re trying to keep in. I just need some idea from you what you’re cooking up in there. Doesn’t have to be the full blueprint, couldn’t understand that anyway, but just something.”

Peridot finally faced 8XM and gave her a peevish look.  
“Ames, I understand your concern. I realize that we are at a small research facility, I realize that it is my job to design and build a perfect killing machine, and I am fully confident that I am doing just that, but - and this is something you need to understand VERY clearly - this design is stable. It isn’t going to need containment because it will be its own containment.”  
Peridot could see 8XM was impressed and it spurred her on.  
“See, what’s growing in there isn’t just some meathead soldier, no offense, this isn’t some grunt you throw in the way of bullets, this isn’t even some kind of special ops marine ranger, no, this - that - she - is going to be a whole person. She’s going to think, and she’s going to reason, and she’s going to be charming, and she won’t need to kick down the door, she’ll talk you into opening it, and then rip your throat out. She’s going to be the perfect killing machine, sure, but you’re gonna be glad you know her. You’re gonna want to be her friend even if she’s hunting you down. She’s gonna be so cool you’ll want to DATE her, even!”

8XM burst out laughing and Peridot’s bubble of enthusiasm popped wetly around her.  
“Oh what do you know?” she snapped, which just made 8XM start all over again. When she finally settled down she stood and went over to where Peridot was sulking by a screen.  
“Hey, Doc.”  
She laid a hand on Peridot’s shoulder. Peridot twitched but didn’t reject it.  
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you, I just like when you get excited.”  
Peridot grumbled.  
“Look, I trust you. I really do, and if you say this thing’ll contain itself, I believe you. Actually -” 8XM put her other hand on Peridots other shoulder and gave a soft squeeze. “Actually I think the only thing around here that needs containment is you.”  
Peridot turned her head back with a begrudging smirk.  
“Ames, what the hell are you doing?”  
“Flirting,” said 8XM, gently rubbing Peridot’s shoulders.  
“You suck at it,” said Peridot, turning around. “But I still like you.”  
“I know you do.”  
8XM pulled her in for an eager kiss that Peridot was only too happy to lean into and enjoy but it seemed to bring 8XM to her senses and she pulled away much too quickly.  
“We’re working,” said 8XM, blushing a little.  
“Y - yeah, we’re working,” said Peridot, who had no idea what to do with her hands. “We’re professionals.”  
“Right. Professionals.”  
“So, um, come by my room later tonight after your shift. Like a professional.”  
“Of course. I’ll do that. We’ll have very professional sex like good work colleagues.”  
8XM broke into a grin and turned to leave. Glancing out into the incubation room again she paused.  
“Doc?”  
“Yeah?”  
“Do you really think this design’s gonna be the one?”  
Peridot nodded, gazing lovingly towards the bulky form still floating peacefully in its cocoon.  
“She’s gonna be perfect, Ames. She’s gonna be unstoppable.”


	2. The Forest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT CONTINUES, and it will continue, if only sporadically. I like to do too many things all at once.

The air out in the forest was wonderful compared to the basement - a little muggy perhaps, but warmer and richer and full of new and exciting smells that Jasper wanted to explore all at once. The basement had been chilly and didn’t smell like anything at all, except for dust and warm electronics. And Peridot. She had quite a nice smell, of course, but Jasper was used to it and didn’t find it all that inspiring - a little too antiseptic. But never mind that now! The world was warm and smelly and crunched underfoot and she decided she was going to like It.

It was sad to leave the lab behind in some ways. It was almost home, after all. The habitats were nice enough, but once you knew how big they were, you never really  _ stopped _ knowing, and if she wasn’t keeping busy with training and tests, or asleep, the fact that she knew exactly the number of steps from one wall to the other gnawed at her. It had contained her whole life in a space too small, like a goldfish inadvisably left in a bowl, but even though she had felt pressed up against the walls sometimes, it had contained all her favorite people and memories, such as they were. 

But those people were gone, and the lab was currently on fire, and Peridot kept going on about potential retaliatory air strikes, so they had climbed out of a broken window with what little they could salvage and were striding through the forest (well, Jasper was striding) into an uncertain future. 

Initially they looked for a parking lot, where Peridot apparently had a car, but after they failed to discover that, Peridot had insisted they find the road and just start walking, they were bound to come across  _ something _ .

“I don’t think there’s a road anywhere near, though,” Jasper pointed out, squinting through the trees for any sign of a break in the vegetation.

Peridot was re-tying a shoe and replied mostly to the ground. 

“Well - okay, there  _ has _ to be, because I remember driving on it when I came here, and I parked my car, and then I went into a building and walked through a tunnel and - oh! Oh wait, it must be on the other side of the hill.”

She stood again and pointed back up towards the lab, which was two thirds of the way up a ridge that made one side of a forested valley. It was a low building, only three stories, and hidden in the trees most of the time. They were only a few hundred yards away and it had already begun to disappear, with only the lazy rolls of smoke from a few places making it easy to spot. 

Jasper scanned the hillside until she found a path up that would avoid the lab and be relatively easy to climb. She still had her doubts about the existence of roads, but at the very least they’d have a better vantage point. She pointed up to their right. 

“We’ll go up this way, then. Keep close to me, and stay quiet,” she said. Peridot was small but so far very good at stepping on dry sticks, and tended to talk while she walked. Jasper didn’t immediately sense any kind of Enemy Presence around, but she couldn’t be completely sure. Peridot looked indignant and snapped “I  _ am _ being quiet!”, which Jasper met with a resigned look. She turned, and started walking up the hill. 

There was a clearing at the top of the ridge where a few trees had fallen, and it looked out over another valley, this one much broader and deeper, with a river running through the bottom of it, just visible through the trees. Forested mountains rose in the distance, tinted blue in the afternoon air.  A breeze blew up the side of the ridge, stirring the loose strands of Jasper’s hair, which she had wrapped up into an industrial-sized bun (she was happy with her hair, of course, it was very striking and lovely, but there  _ was _ an awful lot of it). It felt welcome after the long climb; the muggy air had only amplified her own sweat, and the rush of cool relief over her skin made her sigh happily. The air on this side of the ridge smelled different, too, a little fresher in the breeze, full of pine resin and without as much of the acrid tang of burning plastic.

Peridot arrived after a few minutes, gasping for breath and rubbing at scratches from a thorn-covered bush Jasper had stepped through without noticing. 

“You - left me behind -” she was panting “you - asshole.” 

“I knew you’d make it up and I wasn’t worried about you, that’s all,” was Jasper’s response. Peridot was hard to lose track of. If nothing else, she was the only thing in the forest that smelled of hand sanitizer and yelled at mosquitoes.  

For a moment, Peridot just gulped down air and crouched to tie her shoe again. With that done she looked up and seemed to notice the landscape for the first time. 

“Whoa,” she breathed, and stared in amazement. “I - I don’t remember any of this.” 

Jasper stared in amazement too, only down at Peridot. 

“What?” she grunted. 

“I don’t - I remember driving here and I - I don’t remember what the landscape was like. I know - I know I hadn’t seen anything like it before but - was it like this?” 

Which of course was a question Jasper couldn’t answer, and one that unsettled her. She took a moment to think. 

“Maybe - maybe it was a different time of year?” she hazarded. 

“Maybe. Maybe it just got crowded out by work, who knows.” Peridot shrugged and seemed to come back to herself. “It’s really something, though.” 

Jasper nodded. “It is.” Peridot’s uncertainty was making her have some feelings that she decided to deal with later, when they had a more solid plan of action in place. 

She squinted again as she scanned the slope for any sign of a road. The forest was a little sparser here, but it was still difficult to pick anything out from the gestalt of branches. Eventually Jasper picked out a slight gap in the trees. It could be nothing, but it seemed to be running parallel to the river and it was long enough to appear deliberate. Worth investigating, at least. They needed to get down where they could get water anyway. Jasper cleared her throat and Peridot looked up at her. 

“I think I can see a road. Or something like a road, anyway.” she said. 

“Do you think we can get to it?” asked Peridot, taking a swig from the nearly-empty water bottle she’d managed to rescue from her lab. 

“I’m sure we can. I’ll even give you a head start, and if you fall over you’ll at least keep going downhill.” She gave Peridot a lopsided smirk. Peridot answered by sticking her tongue out at Jasper and muttering “You’re a jerk, Bruiser.” 

As she started down the slope Jasper felt a little more grounded. She always liked being called by her nickname, a gift of camaraderie from the Amethyst guards, and anyway if Peridot was still able to be snarky at her things couldn’t be that bad. 

 

***

 

The world was . . . hazy. Like being half-asleep in a moment where fully asleep and fully awake weren’t quite real yet. 

She heard voices sometimes, although who they were and what they were saying was a mystery. Occasionally it would be brighter, or darker. She was surrounded by warm liquid and seemed outside the reach of gravity for now, but sometimes she felt upside-down, and that was interesting enough. 

Gradually the haze seemed to clear. The voices started to almost make sense, she would see shadows with the lights that moved around and a dim thought that those were People flickered somewhere in her slowly-forming mind. She could just get her thoughts enough together to move sometimes, even to kick, and that seemed to make the shadows outside move, too. She liked that. 

And then one day things became quite sharp, and the warm liquid world around her began to drain away and she felt stings as things detached from her body, and suddenly there it was, she had a distinguishable  _ body _ , and gravity was horribly real and it was pulling her downwards out of warm liquid haze into cold sharp air and she was landing on something hard and feeling liquid in her lungs and coughing and choking and spitting it up - 

And  _ breathing _ . Ragged, punctuated by wet, convulsive coughing at first. Smoother as she got used to it. 

The world came into focus. She looked at it. It looked back. 

She was  _ alive _ . 

There was another person in this huge new sharp bright cold space with her, a small person who was staring at her, bug-eyed, in a way that she would eventually get used to, but which for now was like needles on her skin. 

The small person approached her like someone approaching water of uncertain depth. She had a hand out, delicate and shaking, palm up. The person smelled - smells were crashing in from everywhere - pleasant, unthreatening, very clean. She took in a great gulp of air to get the full effect, and the small person drew back, not turning, but their eyes faltering just for a moment. 

She blinked, slowly, still unused to the light. She looked at the hand again, brought her own hand up, stretched it towards the smaller person slowly, palm up, movement outside of liquid still a little unfamiliar. The small person hesitated, then just as slowly placed their own palm down over it, a tiny pale thing compared to the great dark paw it rested on. The sudden contact made her gasp, but she didn’t pull away. She just stared. And, for the first time in this huge new sharp bright cold existence, she smiled. 


	3. The Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is proving to be a much more sporadic project than I thought it would be, but I'm determined to finish it at some point.

“This is still completely wrong.”

“Well - it _is_ a road, we did find that at least.”

“It’s not the _right_ road, though! None of this is right at all!”

“Please stop yelling.”

“ _I’m not yelling_!”

“Well, whatever you’re doing, it’s very loud, and that’s gonna be a problem if anybody’s tracking us.”

Peridot was about to yell again when Jasper clamped one enormous hand over her mouth, put a finger of the other to her own lips, and froze, listening, eyes darting towards the sky.

“There’s a helicopter coming this way,” she said, every word wound unbelievably tight. “I’m going to carry you. Don’t make a sound. Okay?”

Peridot nodded as her eyes went wide, then found herself scooped up and slung over Jasper’s shoulder. Jasper got a solid grip on her passenger and broke into a dead run down the road, away from the just-audible thudding in the distance. Peridot had one hand on her face trying to keep hold of her glasses, the other clutched tight onto Jasper’s backpack. She was absolutely sure she was going to fall, Jasper’s shoulder bouncing up hard into her sternum as her feet pounded on the dirt and gravel of the emphatically wrong logging road that was all they’d managed to uncover.

Jasper veered off into the forest again, on the downhill side of the road, dodging fallen limbs, skidding to a stop. A thick fir tree had blown down and lay along the ground in the shade of its siblings. Peridot found herself back on her feet, dizzy and shaking. “Under here,” Jasper growled, holding up a few branches. When Peridot didn’t respond Jasper dove into the sudden dark cover of the tree, dragging Peridot with her, crouching over her in the darkness under the tangled pine boughs, breathing heavy and ragged. Over the rush of breath and her own frantic heartbeat Peridot could hear the staccato thudding of the helicopter growing louder, echoing sharply off the hillside.

She had the distinct feeling that she was going to die, that she was going to die and become dead and stay that way. It annoyed the hell out of her. What the fuck kind of sick joke _was_ this? She remembered - _distinctly remembered_ \- driving up to the facility two years ago on a winding road through the hills - two lanes, paved, well marked - pulling off onto a broad driveway, and coming to a security gate marked with a small sign for Diamandis Personnel Solutions Inc. That happened. Really it did. _Really_ . Really? And after showing ID and documents she was let in to an underground parking facility. She parked in it. She got out of her car with her little suitcase and backpack. She was met by Rosa Diamandis (Vice President for New Initiatives) and escorted to an elevator. They went up (she didn’t remember that part very well, but whatever, it was an elevator), and they got out, and there was the research facility, and then two years and three months passed and now she was entirely certain that it was all over. What a _waste_.

The thing that was really messing with her now (with all this new information about the lay of the land outside the facility and its lack of paved roads, security gates, and parking garages), was that she’d never been able to find that elevator again. She’d left - something she didn’t quite need, shoes maybe? Extra pair of shoes? Spare glasses? Chapstick? - some kind of _thing_ in her car and every once in a while she’d think to herself “I should really go get that thing,” and she’d look for the elevator and not find it and give up and do something else. It wasn’t important. There were other things to do. And now the feeling was nagging her that, somehow, not being able to find the elevator was a vital part of a much larger puzzle, but she wasn’t sure how and there was a stick poking into her thigh and sap was getting in her hair and she was going to die, probably. The day had started so nicely, too.

At least she wouldn’t die alone. It wouldn’t have to be by her own hand in a chilly basement without another living soul around. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t nothing, either.

The helicopter seemed to be holding in one spot, as far as she could tell from the sound, anyway. Probably surveying the facility, checking to see if any tracking chips were still active, that would make sense, and -

“Jasper,” she squeaked in a strangled whisper. Jasper didn’t respond verbally but her eyes snapped towards Peridot’s. “Your tracking chip, it’s -”

“Taken care of,” growled Jasper.

“But it’s -”

“Taken. Care. Of.”

Peridot swallowed whatever follow-up questions she had and lay still again. The helicopter was moving again, getting closer, moving fast. The entire inside of Peridot’s head began to vibrate painfully as the violent whapping reverberated through the woods and made the ground shake, and this was definitely going to be the end, and it was going to be loud and stupid. Peridot squeezed her eyes shut and tried to keep from making any sound, but her breath was sticking in her throat like tar anyway.

And then it was past.

Her ears rang as the sound ebbed away down the valley and the stillness of the forest seeped back in around them. She forced open her eyes and found Jasper staring at her.

“You’re not chipped,” she said.

Peridot gave a shaky nod “No”.

“And I’m not chipped _anymore_. So if they’re tracking us they’re doing it on foot and after that sloppy of a start their job’s gonna be easy.”

Peridot choked out an “I’m sorry,”

“We both fucked up. We’ll do better from now on.”

Peridot certainly hoped so.

 

***

 

Peridot bounced on her feet in the main conference room, listening to the air conditioning run and trying not to hyperventilate. This was going to go well. This was going to be exactly what everybody wanted. She _was not_ going to get yelled at again. Oh god she _hoped_ she wasn’t going to get yelled at again.

The door handle clicked and Peridot immediately stilled herself, standing at something like attention by the picture window at the front of the room, as Jaune Diamandis’ personal assistant stepped through the door laden with paperwork. She was followed by the Chair of the Strategic Development Board/Vice President for Mergers and Acquisitions herself, striding into the room still on the phone with some unlucky bastard.

“. . . don’t care if you think it’s a fair offer or _not_ , it’s the offer we’re giving you, and I’d like to see anybody else take an interest in your sorry little biotech outfit in this market anyway. Either we buy you out or we take all our sequencing work in-house and you can kiss your only viable contract goodbye. I can’t stop you from being an idiot but if you come to your senses by the end of the day, call my assistant. I don’t want to speak to you again.”

She hung up the phone and handed it to her PA. She sat down in one of the heavy leatherette swivel chairs that surrounded the conference room table, and acknowledged Peridot for the first time. “You have ten minutes,” was all she said.

Peridot gulped.

“Ms. Diamandis,” she quavered, “I want to present the new test subject to you.”

“Do you.”

“Yes. I think she’s a real improvement on the last two, and I think you’ll be very satisfied with some of the updated features.”

“Will I.”

“Um -”

Peridot pressed a shaking finger to the button that controlled the window blinds. They rolled open to reveal a small, brightly - lit chamber that was mostly taken up by the imposing form of Beta Prototype J, standing at ease in a plain black t-shirt and shorts. Her body radiated power and solidity - not rippling muscle and sinew, but simple, elegant curves that hinted here and there at the tremendous strength that lay beneath them. Sturdy hands tipped with razor sharp claws hung loosely at her sides. Her skin was dark, with a heavy band of freckles across her broad face, and her long, wavy hair was so light as to be almost colorless. Two horns, heavy and rough with sharp tips, sprouted from her temples, bending down and out to frame her face. Between them, golden eyes smoldered under long lashes, regarding Peridot and Jaune Diamandis with quiet interest.

Jaune quirked an eyebrow and almost betrayed a hint of a grin.

“Well,” she said. “I must say your sense of aesthetics is certainly improving.”

“Uh - th- thank you, ma’am.”

“Can it speak?”

“Yes. She can.”

“Lovely. Ask her to come in.”

Jaune stood and shook Jasper’s hand and introduced herself, which was more pleasantries than Peridot had ever seen her perform. She couldn’t help but enjoy watching Jaune (6’1” in heels) looking up to Jasper (8'0" in bare feet), not to mention the ripple of muscle in Jasper’s arm as she gave Jaune’s hand a firm squeeze.

There was some discussion of design specs, and a brief conversation with Jasper herself that showed off her gruffly charming demeanor, even getting a genuine laugh out of Jaune, something Peridot hadn’t heard once in the previous two years. When the ten minutes were up Jaune stood and said “Well! This is a very satisfying development. I look forward to your report on her training, and based on that we’ll discuss scaling up production.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Peridot, practically glowing.

“Nice meeting you, Jasper. I can’t _wait_ to see what you can do for us.”

With a rush she and her PA were out the door again, leaving Jasper and Peridot alone. Peridot let out a breath she’d been holding for several minutes and slumped into a chair. She looked up at Jasper, who was standing with her arms folded, leaning carelessly back against the wall. She gave Peridot a slow blink and a half-grin.

“I take it I’ve given satisfaction?” she said, her voice deep and smoky as old Scotch. The voice was something Peridot hadn’t expected. It made her buzz very slightly every time she heard it. She grinned back.

“Yeah. You did.”

“Good.”

“And I think once you’ve been trained, you’re gonna blow her away _completely_.”


End file.
